Can You Smell When The Rock Is Cooked? Dwayne Johnson’s Career Is On The Ropes

Apparently there’s a finer-than-expected line between everyone smelling what The Rock is cooking, and being just plain cooked. At most points in the past decade-plus, if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had made a triumphant return to his roots at WrestleMania, it would have been greeted with delight – possibly chased with a question of whether such a superstar still needed to get into the ring, having long since gained a much bigger following. Now, it’s actually controversial. Granted, this stems more from fandom of another wrestler than antipathy toward The Rock, but still enough to inspire the question: What the hell happened here? What happened to the guy who was arguably the biggest movie star in the world for much of the 2010s? Is this the end of The Rock as we know him?

Granted, Johnson was never technically an undisputed box office champion, even in his heyday. In the 2010s, Will Smith still scored some smashes across a variety of genres, Denzel Washington’s consistency remained stunning, and Leonardo DiCaprio maintained a near-spotless track record of critically acclaimed hits. But in terms of stars who weren’t making movies in the 1990s, Johnson was the decade’s major breakthrough, even if it took him a while to find his big-screen footing. Starting with 2011’s Fast Five, where his addition to the Fast & Furious franchise felt like a boost of NOS, he gained a reputation as “franchise Viagra”; in short order, the success of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Fast & Furious 6 seemed to confirm the best way to get audiences excited about a sequel was cook up some Rock. (He even sang about it on Saturday Night Live, where he was a beloved repeated host.)

He also headlined several vehicles sold largely on his brawny physique and sometimes-self-deprecating humor: San Andreas, Central Intelligence, Rampage. He restarted another franchise with two massive Jumanji hits. He sang in the beloved Disney cartoon Moana. Not everything he did crushed it at the box office, but his facility with action, comedy, and the occasional family film made him seem something like the new Schwarzenegger promised when Arnold did a torch-passing cameo in Johnson’s 2003 film The Rundown. Maybe it didn’t matter that he left the Fast & Furious franchise after clashing with Vin Diesel. After all, there’s no question of who’s worth more as a solo star.

Then came Black Adam.

There’s a risk of oversimplifying here. Black Adam made $400 million worldwide at a time when movie theaters were still recovering from the ongoing global pandemic. Its $167 million domestic makes it Johnson’s most successful live-action “part one” movie in North America; everything bigger is either a Fast & Furious or a Jumanji. On the other hand, there’s not going to be a part two, because Black Adam helped kill the whole DC movie universe … and maybe Johnson’s career as a movie star with it.

Again, an oversimplification. Johnson has the kind of fanbase that many performers would (and probably will try to) pay millions for. But Black Adam, a pet project of the star, has a White Whale quality. A sorta-spinoff of the well-liked DC movie Shazam!, the movie – which Johnson had been developing for years – would introduce a villain from that corner of the DC universe, only Shazam wouldn’t be directly involved in the introduction. Then, after this origin movie, The Rock had the perfect plan: Black Adam would fight his classic nemesis… Superman?! Johnson had strongarmed Black Adam away from Shazam (despite a recent and popular Shazam movie with a sequel then in the works) and toward a bigger title fight with Superman (despite this incarnation of Superman not appearing on screen in five years). DC, in the midst of their brief “try anything” phase, acquiesced to Johnson’s demands, and furnished a Henry Cavill cameo at the end of Black Adam. It would be Superman’s last appearance in the DCEU. The Rock’s long-held and deeply pointless dream of having a relatively obscure Shazam villain inexplicably rule over the DCEU with an iron first was dead. If anyone but Johnson was in mourning, the world showed no signs of it.

On its own, Black Adam is an agreeably loopy, if quite stupid, third-tier superhero picture, not appreciably worse than some of Johnson’s other movies. As one of those movies, though, it’s a hat on a hat, as the expression goes. Johnson was one of the last remaining superstars whose name itself functioned as the kind of supersized brand audiences have come to expect in the era of superhero movies. Robert Downey Jr. became a massive star… as Iron Man. Chris Evans is hugely popular… as Captain America. Christian Bale has a lot of name recognition, but he’ll likely never be as big as he was… as Batman. Johnson required no “as” to mitigate those size-based superlatives. While he’d typically share the screen with some manner of generic CG spectacle, the real sell was seeing how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson would face that spectacle and emerge, glistening and victorious. His superhero character was already baked right into his name.

So why put a guy like that into an actual (which is to say, CG) supersuit, especially if it’s not to goose the fortunes of an already-existing series? Suddenly, Johnson’s confidence began to look more like a controlling form of arrogance, his popularity mere fuel for his ego. A lot of his movies got by not because they were particularly good – apart from compelling turns in Southland Tales and Pain & Gain, he’s never really made a challenging film – but because their plasticity had just enough flexibility and sturdiness to last 90 to 120 minutes before falling apart. Once the miscalculation of Black Adam came into full view, the calculation of his other movies felt more obvious. They’re simulations of other movies: San Andreas goes through the motions of Roland Emmerich disaster picture. Skyscraper is an imitation Die Hard sequel. Rampage is Godzilla fighting King Kong on a budget.

Now Johnson seems to be hastily conducting a tour of past glories, looking for something people genuinely like: He’s back at Wrestlemania, he’s doing a live-action Moana, and he’s back in Fast & Furious after shooting a post-credits cameo in Fast X, presumably counting on the press about his feud with Diesel making his absence seem longer than one (1) movie. There are more promising signs of a potential Rockaissance, though some of it sounds like his usual routine, like Red One, a holiday-themed adventure movie with Chris Evans. More intriguing, he’s planning to star in a Benny Safdie MMA movie for A24, set around the year 2000 – a meaningful time for Johnson, as he made the jump to movies in 2001, with The Mummy Returns (franchise Viagra from the jump, it seems). Maybe this will put him in mind of a time when his sweat was a sign of exertion, not flopping.

If not, The Rock’s career is far from over. It would take another five or six Black Adam-level problems before he gets demoted back down to wrestler/actor. But to defend his position as a top-tier movie star, he may have to wrestle with himself for a little while longer.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.